Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate : A Spiritual Journey

Book by Benedek Emily

Chapter One
Blinded

The horizon stretches before me, yellow and flat and dry, marked off by run-down cafés, garages, small warehouses. I brake at the intersection that marks the halfway point of my shortcut between Lemmon Avenue and Harry Hines Boulevard. Above me, the traffic light hangs absurdly high; it twists in the breeze, baleful, an omniscient red eye, looking out for trouble.

When the light changes, I continue past Judge Roy Bean's Saloon and Sowell's Liquors, inching my car over the railroad tracks. I check left and right; not only do roads meet here from five directions, but the intersection is also complicated by the raised cicatrix of the railroad tracks. As I pass, I catch sight of a train engine on one of the tracks to my left. It appears to be slowly entering the intersection at an oblique angle. I start, but when I look again, I see it is parked, and remains parked, in back of an oddly out of place Chinese take-out restaurant. As I proceed, I have a funny sensation in my eyes, as if the sky ahead of me had hiccuped, the air had given way.

I take a sharp left and continue past cheap, one-story offices, a sales lot for truck cabs, a neighborhood of shabby bungalows. Most of the city of Dallas seems immune to zoning of any kind, so gas stations bump up against housing complexes, offices are sandwiched between truck lots. Although Dallas has its share of luxurious and beautiful neighborhoods, many areas lack the slightest aesthetic note.

I am headed in the direction of Parkland Hospital, one of two spots in Dallas toward which all roads point, and which still evokes the same images it did when its name and façade were burned into the public consciousness twenty-eight years ago. The other spot, not too far away, the heart of downtown, is the Texas Book Depository, from whose sixth-floor window Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy.

Just before Parkland Hospital, as I pass Majors Scientific Bookstore and roll down the slope past a 7-Eleven onto Harry Hines Boulevard, it happens again, a wrinkle, a tremble in my eyes, a crumpling of space.

The next morning, I wake up and I cannot see. I run my hands over the woven bedspread, slide my legs open and closed like scissors. The sheets are not twisted around me, nor am I sweaty. There is no sign of a nighttime struggle. Rather, the bed is perfectly neat, as if I had hardly moved.

I feel strangely calm. The adrenaline of panic concentrates me, makes my muscles smooth and coordinated, allows me to think clearly. I close my right eye and look straight ahead with my left. The image is clear. I see my host Nancy's collection of mercury glass on the built-in bookshelves that flank the fireplace. I see odd vases, doorknobs, reflecting globes of mirrored, luminous silver glass. I see two ivy topiaries on either side of the mantelpiece.

I move my eye left and right and up and down, and it moves where I direct it. I then close my left eye and look with my right. I can see out of that eye, too. Again, I open both together, and all I can see is a great blur. I look back to the mercury glass, and I realize I am seeing two of everything. I shut my eyes again. I feel sleepy, as if a spell had taken hold of me in the night.

I can see the sunlight, which pours through the windows, on the inside of my lids. I have the thought that when I open my eyes again, the blurring will be gone. I don't concentrate on clear sight, though. I don't try to wish it into existence. In a strange way, alarming though it is, the clouding feels comfortable. I am tired of trying to understand my life; I am weary. I open my eyes again. I mentally walk around the blur, feel my way through it, as I look from the mantel to the windows and toward the living room. I feel removed from the scene, separated by a membrane of unreality. My experience in Dallas in the nine months since I arrived has been so bizarre, so tortured and incomprehensible, that waking up unable to see seems to make perverse sense.

I sit up in bed and swing my legs around to the floor. I stand and realize I feel a bit shaky, so I shut one eye to create a clear image and head for the bathroom. I flick on the light and walk right up to the sink and look in the mirror. I have four eyes, two noses, and two mouths. I shut one eye and look at my face. There are no strange rashes or awful distortions. My complexion is clear, my face relaxed. I look at my left eye. It looks normal, light brown, luminous, rising to a light green around the edge of the iris. I close my left eye and examine my right eye the same way, and it too looks familiar and fine.

The waiting room of the outpatient clinic at Parkland Hospital has stackable, upholstered chairs in bright colors. Magazines like Horse and Rider and Popular Mechanics are scattered on tables. I sit down with a copy of the New Yorker that I have brought from home and a yellow legal pad, which I lean against my chest. I cross my legs and set my bag beside me. It occurs to me that with my posture and this pad I am saying, "I am taking notes. Don't try any funny business." I am not at all sure what kind of doctors I'll find in Dallas.

A middle-aged farm couple is sitting opposite me. The man is thin, with watery blue eyes, and an attitude in his body of trust, trust for the authority of the doctors who will come out and treat him. His wife's gray meringue of hair does not move, even when she leans over to pick up the magazine that has slipped from her lap.

Within a few minutes, I am ushered into an examination room and asked to sit in what looks like a white dentist's chair. The room is clean and brand-new. I settle in with my magazine until I am joined by a young doctor who appears thin, pinched, and very white. He has mousy brown hair. He asks me to read eye charts. He peers into my eyes and asks me to roll them this way and that. He leaves, quickly returns with another doctor, a short woman with curly, shoulder-length hair and spectacles. I want to like her, because she seems competent and serious. She hands me a card, which shows she is a neuroophthalmologist and is board-certified in ophthalmology as well as neurology.

I tell her I have double vision, though I can see fine if I look out of only one eye. She sees that when I look to the right, my right eye seems to give up before reaching its farthest point. "Cannot bury sclera into right lateral epicanthic fold," I watch her write on her paper. She asks me if I have any other symptoms. All I can think of is that I have had a stiff neck for a few weeks, something I get when I am tense. "Soft meningeal symptoms," she adds.

She fits me with different lenses that measure the extent to which I cannot look to the right. She gives me a shot of an enzyme called edrophonium to see if I am suffering from an immune system disorder called myasthenia gravis, the disease from which Aristotle Onassis suffered that required him to tape up his eyelids with Band-Aids. My belly shakes as the drug passes through me, but it has no effect on the double vision. This, she tells me, means I do not have myasthenia gravis. I'm not sure if I am relieved or not. There is a lot of bustling and measuring, but no one says much to me.

After more tests, she writes down "right sixth nerve paresis" and explains that the muscle that pulls my right eye to the outside, away from my nose, is called the right lateral rectus muscle. It is fired by the sixth nerve, a long, narrow filament that travels from the brain stem all the way around the outside of the skull to the eye. There is one on each side, serving each eye. The sixth nerve on my right side, she explains to me, is not firing properly, and it is making my right eye just a tiny bit slower than my left. She does not know why the nerve is misfiring and preventing the two eyes from tracking together, the cause of my double vision. Before I leave, Dr. Zimmerman says she would like me to get a magnetic-resonance-imaging scan, an MRI, to see if there is any abnormality in my brain. The thought of a tumor had occurred to me. For a moment, I brighten. A heaviness lifts at the thought that there might be an explanation for the catastrophes that have befallen me since my arrival in Dallas. Perhaps a brain tumor would explain why my relationship with my boyfriend, Craig, collapsed, or why my job as a television news reporter and producer was falling apart.

When the neuroophthalmologist finishes her exam, I walk out of the clinic office holding a card on which is written the date and time of my appointment for an MRI scan. Before I leave the building, I stop at a pharmacy on the first floor and buy a black eye patch, as Dr. Zimmerman has suggested. "Remember to change it from eye to eye," she tells me, "so both will get exercised." I laugh to myself. I will look eccentric, won't I, eye patch on one eye or the other, changed at will, as if it were some bizarre fashion accessory?

Two days later, my friend Nancy drives me to the MRI, ice clinking in the smoky green glass of diet soda she holds in her right hand, cigarette burning in her left, gold bracelets falling prettily around her Rolex watch. We are in her BMW sedan, which is as heavy as a tank, and hard to maneuver even without the Pepsi glass and ice cubes. Nancy is a beauty. I met Nancy at a gym in Highland Park. She looked to me like she belonged on Nantucket, and I told her so. It turned out she loved Nantucket, and her garden was full of Nantucket hydrangeas.

Now, six months later, she is no longer working out. She is in the middle of a divorce from her husband of twenty years, a man with whom she has two sons. He has left her for one of her friends, a lawyer who works in his office and is herself married to another man. Many of the women I have met in Dallas are embroiled in painful, humiliating relationships. One of them, Tammy, a former Oklahoma beauty queen and Oklahoma U. student, married a hefty, rich lawyer who wears custom-made suits and $1,500 English shoes. Tammy wants a baby, bu...